Sheldon Allan Silverstein was born in Chicago. Some reports say 1930, some say 1932. He was a poet, cartoonist, performer, and songwriter. He wrote some of the strangest, simplest, deepest books that I have ever seen. I have only read these three: The Missing Piece, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, and The Giving Tree.

Those first two are hard to explain. They were shown to me by a tattoo artist who was preparing to ink my …

Language as a Tool for Solving the Global Crisis

“Hakuin Zenji puts it ’self nature that is no nature/ . . . far beyond mere doctrine.’ An open space to move in, with the whole body, the whole mind. My gesture has been with language.” –Gary Snyder, Preface to No Nature.

While it is true that Gary Snyder is both a Buddhist and an environmental activist, and he employs these parts of his life in different ways, perhaps the most interesting way he has combined …

“We have faith in poison.
We will give our lives completely every day.
FOR THIS IS THE ASSASINS’ HOUR.”
-Arthur Rimbaud, Drunken Morning
“The revolution was in his poetry from the beginning and to the end: as a preoccupation of a technical order, namely to translate the world into a new language.”
   -Herbert Marcuse, paraphrasing Rimbaud

In considering the socio-ethico-political function of art, it is easy to lose sight of art itself. We become so enraptured by classification, hierarchies, theory, and the hermeneutical act itself, that hermeneutics ceases to take …

For the record, I love Ernest Hemingway’s books. I’d read most of them before I graduated high school and, only recently, some twenty years later, revisited Hemingway to finish out his cannon. (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, and The Garden of Eden had been the few works I hadn’t read.) Through the course of my re-introduction to Hemingway, I became disconcerted by the fact that I increasingly felt that he had fallen out of favor in modern times. It …

Being Buddhist is about as punk as you can get. That’s according to Santa Cruz spawned author and meditation teacher, Noah Levine. “Punk points to the Buddha’s first noble truth,” he says, “that there is suffering in this life.”

In his debut book, Dharma Punx, Levine traces a parallel between the Punk Rock ethic of “NO FUTURE” and the Buddhist doctrines of impermanence and universal suffering. “Buddhism teaches present time awareness,” he says. “It’s not about living for some future date. It’s about moment-to-moment awareness …

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was born on June 7th in Topeka, Kansas. Brooks’ family moved to Chicago when she was very young and she remained there for much of her life, later becoming a frequent contributor to local and regional publications and programs. She was chosen as the Illinois Poet Laureate in 1948 and was the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Brooks began writing poetry at an early age and was first published at age 13. She …